Why do modern Bible translations leave out verses?

If you've spent much time comparing Bible translations, you've noticed that some verses, or portions of verses, have been moved from the main text into a footnote.

The footnotes usually say that the verse does not appear in the earliest and most reliable manuscripts. Why are these verses questioned by scholars?

Are they attempting to achieve some dark objective which results in casting doubt upon the inspiration of the

Bible? The quick answer is that nothing sinister is going on. Rather than removing verses, scholars have valid reasons to believe that some verses should have never been in the

Bible to begin with. Many people have the mistaken impression that in the original languages, the

Bible is a single document. In reality, scholars have thousands of manuscripts that were all copied at different times and in different places.

The ancient scribes were fanatical about accurately replicating the documents, but they made mistakes sometimes.

Textual criticism is a discipline that seeks to identify copying mistakes in an effort to determine what the original

Bible documents said. The process involves comparing thousands of manuscripts with each other and drawing conclusions about the variant readings.

The end result of this work is a document used as a textual base for translating into other languages.

The King James translators relied upon a Greek text which was compiled by a man named

Erasmus. Erasmus's textual base eventually became known as the Textus Receptus.

By the late 1800s, more manuscripts had been discovered that were older and more reliable than any

Erasmus had access to. They were used to compile a revised textual base that came to be known as the

Critical Text. Consider these variant readings from Acts chapter 20 verse 7 from the

Textus Receptus and the Critical Text. In this instance, the Critical Text uses the word

WE and the Textus Receptus uses THE DISCIPLES. Which reading was more likely the one the author of the

Book of Acts wrote in his original document? In this particular example, modern scholarship leans in favor of the word

WE. Textual criticism tries to determine which reading is more probable when such a discrepancy arises.

With this in mind, perhaps we should consider the question the other way around. Instead of asking, are verses missing?

Perhaps we should be asking, were verses added? It is important to keep in mind that even though there are textual variations in the

Bible manuscripts, they are of minor significance. None of the discrepancies affect the

Bible's crucial teachings. Even if the so -called missing verses were completely removed, the